Shakespeare, y’all! Lexington theater group gives the Bard a shot of Kentucky

With a little over a week until opening night of AthensWest Theatre Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” director Drew Fracher put a twist on rehearsal.

“I said, ‘Let’s just do the whole thing in our best Kentucky dialects, and see what that does for us,” Fracher says. “And it was pretty fascinating and fun. And I’ve been cogitating on the possibility of presenting the play that way, and I’m still not completely decided on it.”

It wouldn’t be out of step with the rest of the production, which Fracher has set in late 19th century Central Kentucky. In this telling, Count Orsino is a renowned equestrian and his conquest, Olivia, is a Bourbon heiress, and the story is told with a bluegrass score. AthensWest Producing Artistic Director Bo List says they might have worked in basketball, but it was a few years away from being invented.

As AthensWest points out, “Twelfth Night,” a comedy about mistaken identity, has been set everywhere from the Wild West to outer space, so the Bluegrass isn’t a huge stretch — except for where the shipwreck that strands and separates Olivia and her brother, Sebastian, is supposed to take place. But for AthensWest, the choice of play came before the Kentucky fried treatment.

“Twelfth Night” is the company’s second play back from nearly two years offstage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Billed as a “Season of Life,” List says the Shakespeare play addresses similar themes to its February production of Robert Harling’s “Steel Magnolias.”

“’Steel Magnolias’ and ‘Twelfth Night’ are both about dealing with loss, overcoming adversity, and seeing what’s next,” List says. “Mark Mozingo, our associate artistic director, has long had an interest in us doing a Shakespeare play. And ‘Twelfth Night’ is a beautiful comedy that has a lot of what we really love, which is the meat and the guts of drama and some tragedy running through it a little bit, amidst all the silliness.”

As the company prepared the production, it has still had to contend with the impacts of the recent tragedy of the pandemic. Since it operates under the rules of Actors Equity, the stage actors union, AthensWest has had to follow all the Equity rules pertaining to safety, including testing and vaccination.

“It was hard as hell, really difficult,” List says. “Our union … rightfully has lots and lots and lots of things that you need to do in order to make sure that the rehearsal space is safe, and that their audience space is safe. And that has included a number of time-consuming and costly adjustments to those spaces, protocols for our actors, etc.”

List says the hardest part has been uncertainty as to whether protocols would change and get harder or easier, or if the whole show might come to a screeching halt.

For Fracher, the task has been to get his company focused on the world they are creating for this play, a world which, as it turns out, is distantly familiar. The director acknowledges theater history is full of ill-advised attempts to relocate Shakespeare’s work. But the Kentucky setting, for this audience, works in somewhat the same way the Kentucky-accented rehearsal worked for the actors.

“I’m always trying to find an entree for the audience,” says Fracher, who previously directed “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” for AthensWest. “And since this theater is named after the fact that Lexington was an arts and cultural center, early on in its inception, and it’s a beautiful place, and it’s pastoral, and it’s idealic, and might it not be fun?”

He hopes the setting will impact audiences in a similar way having the actors perform in natural Kentucky dialects impacted their performances.

“What it did was the actors, I could feel them, everybody in the room just relaxed. You could feel people’s shoulders just go down,” Fracher says. “And they were like, ‘You know what, I can just talk. And I can talk like I usually talk, and nobody’s going to scream at me for having a little bit of a dialect — in fact, it’s been encouraged.’ And it really was an interesting sort of shot in the arm for the actors in terms of their relaxation with the characters and understanding what was going on.”

‘Twelfth Night’

What: AthensWest Theatre Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s comedy

When: April 22 - May 8. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Fri., Sat. and 2 p.m. Sun.

Where: Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, 141 E. Main St.

Tickets: $35 (adult) and $30 (senior, student, active military). Thursday performances are pay-what-you-will.

Online: athenswest.net

Call: 859-425-2550

COVID protocol: Masks covering the mouth and nose will be required for all patrons while in the Arts Center.